I would like to perform an analysis that is the inverse of Near_analysis for ArcGIS. Instead of my result being NEAR_DIST and NEAR_FID, I'd like each feature to have a FAR_DIST and FAR_FID populated with the furthest feature information from a 'far feature'. I can do this with some scripting, but it would be slow, and involve iterating through each feature in a feature class and performing a Near_analysis on each, and picking the furthest distance.

For 2 point layers (note that you can use copy of layer as 2nd) use point distance. Sort output table in descending order by distance. Remove duplicates in input_fid
– FelixIPDec 23 '14 at 22:08

Indexing, by its very nature, is optimized to find "close" things. It's unlikely you'll ever find an efficient way to find "far" ones. There is no shortcut to the furthest possible point.
– VinceDec 23 '14 at 22:13

3 Answers
3

If you have access to an ArcInfo license, you could use the Point Distance tool, which:

Determines the distances from input point features to all points in
the near features.... The tool creates a table with distances between
two sets of points. if the default search radius is used, distances
from all input points to all near points are calculated. The output
table can be quite large. For example, if both input and near features
have 1,000 points each, then the output table can contain one million
records.

Run this with no search radius, then filter to find the pairs with the greatest distance.